The Reconstruction of the Mind
by nb41
Summary: Jane Foster's introduction to astronomy doesn't start with a backyard telescope or a shooting star or the arm of the Milky Way strewn across the nighttime sky, but with an Alexandrine woman named Hypatia.


**Notes:** Jane Foster-centric. The Pepper/Tony and Jane/Thor are minor.

For this prompt at comment_fic: 'That one time in college', Any, any + any, "You know, you're not being as helpful as you think you are, telling me to read that in the original Greek. I don't *know* any Ancient Greek."

Apologies to those who specialize in Classics and know things about Ancient Alexandria and Greek philosophers. I know only what the Internet and some cursory research could provide, and I was pretty liberal with my interpretations of both.

* * *

Most of Jane's peers, when asked how they wound up studying astrophysics, responded with stories of inspiration born from celestial bodies: looking through backyard telescopes at Andromeda or Saturn; gazing up at the arm of the Milky Way on a clear night; counting Perseids as they drew brilliant trails across the late summer sky. Jane had similar experiences and they did fill her with wonder and leave their mark, but they were stepping stones on a path whose foundations were set down in a world history class during her sophomore year of high school.

"Jane," Professor Tax said, having come to her name on the list of new graduate students. "What first drew you to astronomy and physics?"

"Hypatia," she said.

* * *

Ms. Kelley was a mountain of a woman with a booming voice and awe-inspiring presence better suited to great lecture halls filled with hundreds of admirers rather than the short-ceilinged, crowded high school classrooms where she taught World and US History to unruly teenagers. When she was older Jane would count herself lucky for having Ms. Kelley two years in a row, because she made sure they covered a wide variety of topics in their assignments, including the intellectual pursuits of the time periods they were examining. Everything from engineering to agriculture to math to astronomy was up for grabs on a test or quiz.

"The assignment sheet lists forty intellectuals from antiquity. I want you to pick five. You have two weeks to write an essay for each one of the five you choose, describing some of their achievements and the relationship of those achievements—or its lack—to the field in question today. Length and formatting requirements are on the reverse."

Students muttered around her. A few made jokes about the names. "Pappus," one boy giggled, apparently thinking the punchline was obvious.

Jane scanned the list. She knew a few of the names, but one in particular stood out, because it belonged to a woman and she didn't recognize it.

"Ms. Kelley."

"Yes, Miss Foster."

"We didn't talk about Hypatia in class. Who was she?"

"A mathematician and astronomer in Alexandria." Ms. Kelley closed the textbook on her lectern with a resounding thump. "The rest, you can get from the school library, and tell me about in an essay."

* * *

When Jane discovered none of Hypatia's writings had survived to modern times, she was less than thrilled. (_Despondent_, she would later tell her friend Catarina, and would mean it; the only thing weighing on her mind more heavily was the upcoming PSAT.)

"Unfortunately we have none of Hypatia's work to read for ourselves," her father said.

Jane's jaw dropped open. "How come?"

He was walking his fingers along the spines of a row of books in her mother's study, a task which was engrossing enough that he was some time in replying. "Well it's the case with numerous of the ancient intellectuals. Some of them relied on oral tradition, others—like our dear Hypatia—may have only had copies of their texts in libraries long-since destroyed. Say, the Library of Alexandria, for example. It's not like it is now, where there's copy after copy in bookstores and collections the world over."

Jane bit down on a curse. She wasn't supposed to swear, and absolutely not in front of dad. "So all we have is just what other people wrote about her?"

"Sadly. A shame, too. I really wouldn't mind a look at her _Astronomical Canon_—ah. Here." He pulled out a textbook and offered it to her. "Archimedes, Pappus, and Euclid. Just excerpts, mind, but your mother probably has complete volumes in here," he waved at the wall of towering bookcases behind him with his reading glasses, "somewhere. In any case, this should be a good start for your assignment."

"And what about Hypatia?"

"Oh, well..." He father went back to the shelves. He returned with another book after a few minutes; a history of ancient Alexandria. "That one probably has the best chapter on her."

She took it, because it was better than nothing, and put the first textbook (a history of ancient mathematicians) on top. She flipped that one open and scanned some of the pages. "How much of this am I going to understand?"

"At least some. They were inventing this as they went along, you know." He gave her one of those calculating smiles of his. "Better question is, how much will you understand enough to recognize what's not right?"

She raised her chin at him in teen-aged defiance. "More than you did the first time you read it, I bet."

Her father's smile turned indulgent. "Almost certainly."

* * *

She spent the most amount of time on her essay about Hypatia, which she reasoned was because she had to work so hard to find any useful information about her. Along the way she amassed an enormous list of questions for her father, and pestered him nightly for explanations, demonstrations, and time with the telescope in the backyard. That led to further inquiries, to the point where he eventually suggested he should, each night, give her a brief lesson in something relating to astronomy.

"This way it's not haphazard," he said. "We can build on what you know, and I'll have some time to plan what I show you."

Jane bit her lip. "As long as there's no homework."

"Unless your mother agrees to grade it for me, no, there will be no homework."

That wasn't as reassuring as he probably meant it, because Jane's mother was convinced she wasn't being assigned anywhere near enough homework, and lamented this sorry state of affairs non-stop.

Just the same, the prospect of her father teaching her more about astronomy was too much to pass up, and Jane said, "Okay."

When she handed in her essays, the one on Hypatia was easily twice the length of the other four. It got her an A+, and her mother proudly pinned it to the refrigerator with a magnet and thoroughly embarrassed Jane anytime a relative or friend came over. Just the same, Jane reclaimed it once its tour of duty was completed and put it into an envelope, unsure why she didn't want to part with it.

Two years later as she was cleaning out her desk and packing for college, she came across it again, and added it to a box. The college library would be a much better place to read up on Hypatia, if she ever had the time.

* * *

As it turned out, she did have the time, because every so often she'd have two classes with a gap between them which hit the sweet spot of too short and not long enough, and the library was as good a place to while away those hours as any. It became a hobby of sorts; something to distract her when she was struggling with an assignment or a new topic in class. She'd wander through the Ancient History collection and photocopy a few pages of a text her mother didn't have, or read through a chapter jotting down notes. Along the way she learned about other women intellectuals and astronomers from antiquity, like Enheduanna of Sumeria and Aganice of Thessaly.

Since she couldn't read anything written _by_ these women, she settled for reading _about_ them, which was not the same thing but it would have to do. And as with any second-hand story of someone gone for thousands of years, there were disagreements on translations and accounts, and she found herself wishing she had anything original to read, along with some way to read it. Interpretation of data was as important as the data itself, even when the 'data' was a historical record.

One night, her roommate Lakshmi said, "You're muttering to yourself about hating male historians again." Lakshmi was up late trying to finish an engineering assignment; Jane was waiting for her program to finish parsing fake data for her Observation Techniques course.

Jane said, "You'd hate them too if you read some of the things they write," and tossed another book aside. "Especially about women."

"What class is this for? Did you take some kind of history elective?"

"It's not for a class, it's just a thing I do when I'm not doing other things."

"You read history books written by jerks?"

"Trust me, I burned through the ones written by _non_-jerks right away." Jane leaned back against her pillow, which she'd propped up against the wall, and rubbed at her eyes. She glanced over her shoulder at her computer monitor. Still not done. "Now I'm down to second- and third-hand accounts translated by people who don't agree on anything except the color of the sky."

"Maybe you just need to read them in the original Greek."

Jane groaned. "You know, you're not being as helpful as you think you are, telling me to read that in the original Greek. I don't _know_ any Ancient Greek."

Lakshmi grinned. "Guess you need to get yourself a boyfriend who does. Or you could take Classics."

"I tried taking Classics already. Didn't stick."

"Then you have no choice but to obtain a linguistically-inclined boyfriend. Probably from the Classics Department."

"No choice," Jane agreed with a nod.

"None," Lakshmi insisted. "You need to find yourself a cunning—"

"_Don't_," Jane said, and threw a pen at her. Lakshmi laughed and batted it aside.

* * *

When an archeology team in Egypt located a potential site for the Library of Alexandria, Jane was glued to the news for days, but nothing appeared to come of it. No secret chest of old manuscripts; no miraculously preserved scrolls or loose pieces of papyrus. She told herself it had been foolish to hope, and went back to digging through historical documents and translations as a break from her double-major and eventual PhD.

Moving her research out to New Mexico slowed things down. Their library was lacking, any time she needed to ILL a print copy of something it took weeks to arrive, and her work life consisted of minuscule breakthroughs broken up by long stretches of defending herself from accusations of chasing crazy fringe theories. Even Erik was skeptical of her ideas, something that hurt more than she was willing to admit.

Then one night, she hit an alien with her van.

* * *

It wasn't until after her unplanned sojourn in Tromsø came to an end that Jane stumbled across her collection of files and notes again. She was packing for London, where she'd secured a position as a visiting scholar in the hopes of taking her mind off the lack of progress with her current Einstein-Rosen Bridge work and to help Erik with his latest project relating to gravitational fluctuations.

She flipped through the pages and wondered if they had felt like this back in antiquity as well. Had they reached for ideas and theories that seemed to slip through their fingers? Had the answer felt so close that they had to keep grasping until they caught hold of something, anything, or risk being called frauds and pale imitations of other, greater scientists? Or had they been calm and undeterred in their seeking, and viewed setbacks as just another step in the learning process?

A bitter voice inside her said, _I bet their setbacks didn't include aliens from other galaxies forgetting about them_.

Jane sighed. She'd resolved to stop thinking about Thor, but it could be hard to stick to, even in the face of the reality that if he showed up again, he did, and if not, that was that. She'd spent almost two years trying to figure out a way to reconnect what he'd called the Bifröst to Earth, and had come up empty-handed. At some point she had to cut her losses. Like with the Library of Alexandria, wormhole research had been a long shot, and in her more honest moments she could admit that she'd known that going into it.

Darcy's voice interrupted her introspection, calling from downstairs. "Jane."

"Up here," she said. A few seconds and some pounding on the stairs later Darcy appeared in the doorway.

"Truck's here. Any other boxes?"

She fingered the high school essay. So what if there was no Library of Alexandria left to find. So what if she was never going to learn Ancient Greek. So what if she had no way to reach Thor, and so what if he wasn't ever coming back.

"Yeah," she said. "This one."

Darcy offered her the roll of packing tape, and Jane sealed the box up extra-tight.

* * *

London didn't prove to be as easy on her work-life balance as she would have liked. The college had her doing numerous guest lectures, it was impossible to find an apartment or anything remotely resembling lab space (she made due with her mom's house, which was practically an adjunct library at this point), and Erik was difficult to communicate with in the wake of New York.

Of course since that wasn't enough, she got possessed by a super weapon, Thor came back, and a Dark Elf named Malekith tried to destroy the universe from Greenwich, all in the same handful of days.

The box patiently waited for all of this to die down, safe in her broom closet of an office at the college.

* * *

Contract work for Stark Industries was much easier on her free time than anything up to that point, and as she settled into her temporary life in the Tower she went back to Hypatia and her elusive sisters in ancient astronomy.

One afternoon Tony stopped by her lab desk and asked, "What're you up to?"

Jane high-lighted a passage in the photocopy she was reading in bright blue. "Doing another test run before I commit a bigger job."

"Saw that." Tony tapped at her notes and then the manuscript images displayed on her monitor. "I mean this. It looks like," he made a disparaging face, "Classics homework."

"It's just something I do while code's compiling, or results are pending, or whatever."

"Hobby?"

"I guess. Some people collect bugs or play video games or take photos, I dig around in libraries reading about women scientists from antiquity."

Tony took a big drink from his water bottle. "I hated Classics. I only took it on a dare. Dropped it after a week."

"Of course you did," Jane said. She put a sticky tab down on another paragraph. "I've been trying to put together as much as I can about what women like Hypatia _actually_ worked on and studied, as opposed to what everyone likes to _say_ they did."

"Hypatia. Isn't she the one who was dismembered by Christians?"

Jane gave him a brief look which she hoped conveyed the depths of her extreme disgust. "Go figure, the main thing you and everyone else remembers her for is how she died, not what she did when she was alive."

"I assume your goal here is to do something about that?"

She shrugged. "I'm not a historian. That's what my mom does. I just want to know." She swapped out the photocopy for a book. "But reading translations of translations of someone else's accounts gets pretty frustrating after a while."

Tony leaned against her desk. "Well maybe you just need get it in the original Greek."

Thinking of Lakshmi, Jane smiled and said, "I can't read Ancient Greek."

"Who needs to? You have a boyfriend with language magic."

Jane stilled, feeling rooted to her chair. When she slowly looked up to Tony, he bobbed his eyebrows. "I grant you he may not be up for translating two thousand year old parchment—"

"Papyrus."

"Whatever. Worst case, it comes out sounding like someone reading _Elements_ at a Renaissance Faire while trying to stay in character. Might be good for a laugh, if nothing else."

Jane couldn't believe it had never even occurred to her. And yet maybe that was understandable, since she and Thor had plunged into their relationship head first at maximum speed, and so were still learning about one another in an awkward, almost teenager-like manner.

It was probably a bit much to expect he would be willing to translate everything she put in front of him, but maybe the more problematic passages? And there was also the part where the Allspeak didn't always translate _back_ to Jane the way she expected it to, and Thor's explanations of how it worked were downright metaphysical, especially for him.

Also... "Even if he is, nothing she wrote made it out of the Library of Alexandria."

"That's a shame. Someone should try to find it." Tony turned a page of her notes so it was facing him.

Jane sighed. "There's probably not anything left to find. A team of archaeologists excavated what they think was the site a few years ago, but no scrolls. Just lecture halls."

Tony gestured with his water bottle. "Maybe someone kept a secret vault."

"Don't I wish," Jane said.

* * *

Despite the lack of Hypatia's own work, there were other pieces on which Jane wanted a second opinion, so she ran the idea by Thor that evening after dinner.

"I should be able to read them, but I am still learning to use your writing system, and even then I am not a skilled scribe."

"I figured." Jane held up her digital voice recorder. "That's what's what this is for. You can dictate them." His temporary confusion turned to understanding, and he nodded. She pulled an image up on her tablet and handed it to him, and couldn't help but hover over his shoulder as he examined it.

He tilted his head and said, "These are ancient writings?"

"By our standards. Over fifteen hundred years old." Which was, she realized, not older than him, and sure enough his expression had turned wry.

"Ancient indeed," he said, and she gave him an apologetic smile. He seemed to smother a laugh, and turned his attention to the tablet.

"Can you read it?" Jane asked, anxious for no real reason.

"Yes. Though some of the words seem strange. The more of it I read the better the Allspeak will translate it." He glanced up at her. "I assume this language is no longer spoken?"

"Not like this, no. But there are languages related to it."

"If I could hear recordings of those, or read written texts, that will help as well." Jane raised her eyebrows at him. He said, "The magic allows me to decipher what is being conveyed, but it helps to be..." He paused, eyes roving as he searched for a word. Finally, he settled for, "Attuned."

"So the magic _learns_ the language?"

"In a sense." He placed his finger at the start of a paragraph and read, "And though there shall be no memory for the dead in...Hades, even there I will remember you, my dear Hypatia. I am surrounded by the suffering of my village, and disgusted by it, for I see my enemies every day, and men are slaughtered like victims upon an altar."

Jane wrapped her arms around his chest and set her chin on his shoulder. "Do me a favor." He looked askance at her. "Don't ever tell anyone in a Classics Department that you can do this."

Despite that he probably had no idea what a Classics Department was, much less how to identify a member of one, Thor assured her, "I will not."

* * *

Three weeks later she was just putting the finishing touches on a new algorithm for parsing the Greenwich data when Bruce's voice broke into her concentration.

"Jane."

He sounded like he did when something had him excited and concerned and focused all at the same time. It made her pay just enough attention to respond with, "What?" though she didn't look up.

"You're never going to believe what some archaeologists just dug up."

She saw movement out of the corner of her eye; he'd swiveled a flat panel display to face her desk. CNN was up, displaying some sort of dark corridor strewn with work lights. The ticker on the bottom read, _Breaking News: Underground cache of famous Library found?_

* * *

Jane and Bruce had a proposal together in under a day. It took Bruce an hour to convince Tony to talk to Pepper. He made them come with him for 'moral support'. They held their meeting in the kitchen over lunch.

"Hey, Pep, who do we know in the State Department?"

"Who do we know, or who are we friends with?"

"The latter's better, the former could work."

"Maggie and I still keep in touch. Why?"

"Is she the one who—" Pepper arched an eyebrow at him, and Tony said, "Right. Anyways, there's this thing going on in Egypt. Banner and Foster are interested. Oh, and I am too, if that helps."

Pepper looked between Bruce and Jane. "That vault they found?"

Jane nodded. "They think it might be some sort of special storage from the Library of Alexandria. They won't be sure until they can get recording equipment into it."

"They can't just crack it open," Bruce continued. "The environmental change could damage whatever's inside."

Tony followed that up with, "Think we could donate some equipment in exchange for digital access?"

Pepper frowned. "Probably, but—why?"

Tony gesticulated widely. "Who knows what's down there. We found a ship that was buried in a mountainside for five thousand years and it had plans for a hyperdrive in it. Maybe the Ancient Alexandrians wrote down something interesting. Hell, maybe someone really _did_ know how to turn lead into gold."

Pepper gave him a skeptical look, then transferred it to Jane and Bruce. Bruce smiled winningly.

"I would love to know what's down there," he said.

"Same," Jane said.

Pepper narrowed her eyes. "Even if we can get early access, we'll have to wait weeks for translations."

Bruce said, "A joint CS and linguistics team at MIT just released a new OCR, neural-network based translation program. Open Source. They trained it on Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments."

Pepper looked unconvinced. Tony said, "Thor can help us fill in the gaps."

At that her expression turned thoughtful. She took a drink from her lemonade and turned her attention to her laptop. "Get me a full proposal and budget and I'll talk to Maggie."

Tony turned so he wasn't facing Pepper and gave Jane and Bruce a clandestine thumbs up. Jane dared not hope for anything, but oh, how she wanted to.

* * *

They had the equipment manufactured and on its way to Egypt in record time. Pepper had to finagle a little bit with the State Department, and the Egyptian university which had backed the dig was wary of involving Americans, but not so much that they weren't willing to trade digital finds (_no_ access granted to originals) in exchange for special scanners, cameras, lighting equipment, environmental control chambers, and the like. Jane was glad to have so much work to do on the new probes destined for Neptune and Uranus; she didn't want to be lunging for her phone any time it pinged for an email like Bruce and Tony were.

One night as she and Thor lay in bed drifting off to sleep, she murmured, "What if it's all too damaged to read."

Thor's breath was warm on her neck. "That would be unfortunate. Though its existence could mean there are others like it."

"Or it might not be anything from the Library. It might just be junk."

"That is also possible. But it is not so foolish to hope."

Jane thought back to just before she'd gone to London. Well, she did have Thor back, didn't she? And the archaeologists had found, if not what Jane wanted in particular, _something_, and that something could turn out to be anything. Sometimes your hopes weren't answered, and sometimes they were, just not in the way you expected them to be.

"Yeah," she said around a yawn. "I guess not."

* * *

"Foster!"

"Jane!"

Jane almost fell out of her chair in her panic to scramble back from Tony and Bruce. They both had their cellphones in hand and crazed gleams in their eyes.

"We've got it," Tony said, sounding triumphant.

Bruce chimed in, "They're uploading now."

"What. What do we have. What's being uploaded," she asked, suppressing the urge to edge away from them.

"The feed. They have the chambers set up and they're going through the scrolls now."

"What, live?" Jane got up slowly. As soon as she was on her feet they began to herd her to the other end of the lab.

Bruce said, "They're prepping them for the containers, scanning them, and putting the scans onto the cloud storage while they do it."

"No waiting," Tony added. They had various fragments up on the monitors, maybe based on their potential contents. Partial translations were inset next to the images, patchy in the way automatic, machine-learned translating via optical character recognition could be.

"How many?"

His eyes on an email, Bruce said, "They think about one thousand scrolls. All papyrus. Maybe a third of them are intact. The rest have damage, ranging from 'ruined' to 'a little'."

"Intact? How could they be intact?"

"That's what _I_ want to know," Tony said. "Some sort of preservation technique we don't know, maybe? I'm telling you—alchemists were a real thing."

Jane wandered among the screens. "I should go get Thor."

"Already told JARVIS to send for him," Tony said.

Jane thanked him absently. After examining a handful of the images, she asked, "Do we have a list of what they think they've found so far?"

"Yeah, ah..." Tony moved to a monitor and shoved folders around until he came to one with what looked like an enormous index. He started flipping through the files. "A partial copy of _Elements_, something that might be the _Phaenomena_, something called..." He squinted at the readout, "_The Celestial Rulebook_—"

"_The Astronomical Canon_?" Jane felt her heart thud in her chest as she rushed over to Tony. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Thor come into the lab. He moved to join them, pausing when he came to the array of displays.

"Uh, sure. I don't exactly read Ancient Greek, I'm just going by what the auto-translator says it—"

Jane almost shoved Tony away from the monitor. She opened the file, and images of discolored scrolls and their precious, fragile text filled the screen. "Thor. Thor come here."

The urgency in her voice summoned him across the room with surprising speed. "What is it?"

She pointed at what she hoped was a name or a description. "This, right here. What does it say?"

He leaned in, frowning. "The Laws of the Heavens," he said. Jane tried to contain herself.

"What about _The Astronomical Canon_? Is that another way to translate it?"

Thor looked at her, then back to the images on the monitor. After considering them for a minute, he said, "Yes, it could also say that."

Jane let out a breath she'd been holding since her sophomore year of high school.

* * *

She was working on getting her next iteration of the probe firmware into a test cycle so she could spend the intervening three hours with the images and translations from the vault when Thor arrived to take her to lunch. She convinced him to let her finish, and he moved among the displays of the scrolls, content to read while he waited.

She came out of the hardware lab to find him going through the images of Hypatia's work. He glanced at her and nodded at the display. "This is very interesting," he said. "Who was it written by?"

"Her name was Hypatia." Jane almost sat down in a chair, the story at her mind's fingertips, then her stomach made a truly embarrassing noise. Thor gave her an amused look, and Jane sighed and took one of his hands in hers.

"Come on," she said, leading him to the elevator. "I'll tell you all about her over lunch."


End file.
